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The Words and Music of World War II
(Columbia/Legacy)
Right now, many Americans are renewing their long-time love affair with the Second World War. The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw's recent paean to the men and women who fought abroad and at home, has enjoyed considerable popularity, spawning a series of companion volumes and a television special. This summer saw the release of Pearl Harbor, a fictional account of the infamous attack that failed at the box office not because of a lack of interest in WWII, but because of the film's hokey melodramatics. Riding that wave of popularity, Columbia/Legacy has released The Words and Music of World War II. This two CD compilation is a mass of sound bites and music from the Second World War stitched together with commentary from a present-day announcer. It strives to be an audio documentary of that war's social history and culture. Yet for lovers of music or of history, it fails to satisfy.

On the one hand, Columbia offers an impressive array of top artists from the era, ranging from Benny Goodman, Kate Smith and Doris Day to Bob Wills and Gene Autry. Yet, listeners are typically offered only brief extracts of their songs, barely lasting a minute. The emphasis in The Words and Music of World War II, then, is clearly on the words. This is not necessarily bad, however. Listeners may intrigued by the BBC's moving accounts of the Blitz, or by the solemn tones of FDR as he forever labels December 7, 1941, "a day that will live in infamy." Perhaps most interesting and thrilling are the stories of the British evacuation of Dunkirk and bombing runs over Berlin that Edward R. Morrow filed for CBS Radio.

On the other hand, this flood of words may lead the listener to wonder whose words we are NOT hearing. Tending to paint a rosy picture of what Studs Terkel called, not without some irony, "The Good War," The Words and Music of World War II presents only the successful exploits of white male reporters and soldiers. While it does mention the wartime experiences of women and minorities, it doesn't explore them fully. As a result, we learn of women's work in the factories, but nothing of how the dissatisfaction of being driven from the workplace at war's end eventually resulted in the resurrection of the women's movement a decade later. Furthermore, while the service of blacks is applauded as a reaction against segregation at home, no mention is made of how segregation also engendered a profound sense of discontent that led to the Detroit race riots of 1943, one of the worst racial conflicts in American history.

These omissions make The Words and Music of World War II into what the announcer himself describes as a "fairy tale" about the War. Considering the profound impact of that conflict on our world, our society and our families, perhaps a compilation that is more in-depth, more solid and more honest would be appropriate. Scott Hoffman [buy it]

For fans of: World War II nostalgia & history